Upcoming Lecture

Dr. Kori Schake

Dr. Kori Schake, Deputy Director-General, International Institute for Strategic Studies; Author of Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Harvard University Press 2017); contributing editor at The Atlantic and War on the Rocks. Dr. Schake has held policy positions across government, academia and think tanks, including working with both the military and civilian staffs of the Pentagon, in the White House at the National Security Council, and at the US State Department as Deputy Head of Policy Planning.

Reception to follow (location TBD).

Past Lectures

From Brexit to Donald Trump: How Far Does the Economy Explain the Rise of Populism and Nationalism?

Join us as Martin Wolf, Associate Editor and Chief Economics Commentator of the Financial Times, London, gives his talk, “From Brexit to Donald Trump: How Far Does the Economy Explain the Rise of Populism and Nationalism?”

This year’s Underhill Lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for British Studies, the Institute of European Studies, the Institute of International Studies, and the British American Business Council.

Making Britain Great Again? Lessons for America from Brexit

The special relationship between the UK and the US has been underscored by the passage of Brexit and the victory of Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee this summer. Join author, historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson to discuss the parallels in these recent events and lessons to be learned from the British experience on Thursday, October 13th. Professor Ferguson will be giving the prestigious R. Kirk Underhill Lecture sponsored by the Anglo-American Studies Program at the Institute of Governmental Studies, UC Berkeley.

Ferguson has explored extensively the histories of the UK and the US in best-selling books such as Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, both of which were made into British television series. Adding to his lineup of 14 published books, Ferguson released in 2015 the first volume of the authorized biography of Henry Kissinger entitled Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist. Ferguson is a frequent commentator on current events, writing a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and the Boston Globe.

This past summer, Ferguson departed Harvard University, where he served as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History, to be a full-time Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where he plans to work on the second volume of his Kissinger biography. A full biography of Niall Ferguson can be found here.

Old Friends, New World: The US and the UK in the 21st Century

On the day of one of the UK’s most highly anticipated elections, Lord Patten of Barnes will address the state of the US-UK relationship and what this relationship means for the world.

Spanning his career as a leader of the Conservative Party, the Governor of Hong Kong, and now as Chancellor of Oxford University, Lord Patten combines his insider knowledge about British politics with the international perspective of a diplomat to track the evolving special relationship between the two countries.

This lecture is the inaugural R. Kirk Underhill Lecture. The R. Kirk Underhill Lecture brings a leading figure from political or scholarly circles in the United Kingdom to UC Berkeley to discuss British affairs and their implications for the United States.